Plan better collaborative Projects with the clearest View inside of DALIM ES!
“Project management” contains two sets of tools. One set builds the approval process among project partners—along with deadlines and triggers to continue production automation. The other set of tools is analytical. They help project managers locate inefficiencies in their workflows to locate where processes can be improved.
Manage all approval workflows from a centralized location
Just like the process to build a production workflow, the requirements to build a sound project management system can be pretty complex. You may want the help of a DALIM SOFTWARE technician to help you.
However, in broad strokes, If you’re going to make sure every stakeholder has the opportunity to conduct reviews and approvals for every project—and you have the ability to track them—you have to build a process that lets that happen. That’s what ES Project Management is all about.
Before you begin, you need to collect the names and contacts for each stakeholder and each group because your company may be department or client-based, subject to password protection. Identify whose approvals are required for each step to proceed. This is usually referred to as “role and rights management.” Not everyone needs to review every project—particularly when different departments or clients are involved. Once that is done, you can start building the project management workflow, building in the required production workflow steps, dependent upon whose approvals you need.
You will also want to evaluate and improve the process over time. This will require some sense of quantifying how efficiently projects are completed. Perhaps one of the most complex facets will be to determine what metrics are most important to you.
Manage your projects easily
DALIM ES project management is fully integrated with all other major ES functions, like digital asset management and online proofing. It adds a visual layer on top of the automated workflow. All files and tools are integrated and connected.
Milestones are built from the workflows—and those can give tasks estimated duration times, so you are aware when they should be completed. The workload can be tracked for any resource (such as people and machines) and assigned to every project’s various milestones and tasks in the system.
Unless you’re working 24/7, you can’t expect a response in the middle of the night. Therefore, the ES calendars are smart enough to consider global time zones and hours of operation for each facility—even available staffing.
The best part is that, when facing many projects and limited resources at once, ES can help to allocate tasks efficiently or prioritize which projects utilize those resources first.
ES provides data-driven transparency with overall visual status and detailed progress for every project. It can show project managers and administrators the exact status of each project. You can see if it’s in a stage of production or waiting for a review and approval. So, while ES has the control to remind everyone if an action is required, you have the same visibility and power to remind someone. You can look at each project from different perspectives: the calendar, each task, Gantt views, resources, and workflows. You can choose the view that helps you make the quickest decisions within your creative projects. Our planning tool offers them all, giving you all the control you need.
If you wish, you can even use an interactive Kanban view—a ‘board view’ on your workstation that shows all your project milestones and tasks as cards that are dragged and dropped into status columns, like “backlogged,” “in progress,” “in review’ or “done.”
What can you learn from all this?
It turns out a lot.
With complex projects, you need clarity to make sure they are running correctly, as fast as possible. DALIM ES creative Project Management tools and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboards give you a good amount of control and transparency. They help you to see what is going on before and after a project is completed. These tools offer mobile access to AI-based dashboards and templates—and they are all customizable. So, you can track approvals and reallocate software and human resources capacity to keep your production processes flowing.
At the end of a project, you can review performance, for example, comparing the planned duration and actual duration of each task, all recorded by ES. An interactive Gantt view can assess milestones and tasks performed against time. Those who are managing the DAM can understand how and where the assets are being used.
Without going into needless detail here, ES has a data engine based on an open system of data searches (Elasticsearch) and an interface to help you visualize your project data in different charts (pie charts, histograms, tables, etc.) building (Kibana). Your IT people are probably familiar with these.
You have to make sure your work is conducted as effortlessly as possible. ES makes sure it is.
